Nate Silvers (January 18, 2016): "Bernie Sanders is the only candidate in either party with a net-positive favorability rating — but Trump is the most unpopular of all. His favorability rating is 33 percent, as compared with an unfavorable rating of 58 percent, for a net rating of -25 percentage points. By comparison Hillary Clinton, whose favorability ratings are notoriously poor, has a 42 percent favorable rating against a 50 percent unfavorable rating, for a net of -8 points."

The new CNN/WMUR poll also shows that Almost 6-in-10 say they see Bernie as the more presidential candidate in the field, compared to only 33% for Clinton.

Why did the white working class abandon the Democrats? Democrats have occupied the White House for sixteen of the last twenty-four years, and in that time scored some important victories for working families — such as the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit and the Family and Medical Leave Act. But they’ve done little to change the widening structural imbalances in the economy that have hurt the working class.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have ardently pushed for free trade agreements [such as NAFTA and PNTR for China by Clinton; and the Triple Trade Treaty Threat by Obama, all of which Bernie Sanders has opposed]. But they didn’t provide the millions of blue-collar workers who
thereby lost their jobs means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.

They also stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the white working class. Clinton and Obama failed to reform labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them, or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes. [Bernie Sanders has always steadfastly supported unions, marched in picket lines, and has all his campaign apparel made in the U.S. by union workers.]

In 1992, Bill Clinton promised such [union] reform, but once elected, he didn’t want to spend political capital on it. In 2008, Barack Obama also made the same promise (remember the Employee Free Choice Act?) but never acted on it. Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 12
percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a share of the economy’s gains.

Also, the Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout, but let millions of underwater homeowners to drown. [Hillary Clinton voted for the big bank bail outs, while Bernie Sanders was against them.]

Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – with the result that large corporations have grown far larger, and major industries more concentrated.

And they both turned their backs on campaign
finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. And he never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue
a constitutional amendment overturning “Citizens United v. FEC,” the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. [Bernie Sanders regularly pushes to repeal Citizens United and wants to restore publicly funded elections to get big money out of elections.]

What happens when you combine free trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You get an economic structure favoring the wealthy and a political system favoring the powerful — while workers without college degrees suffer declining real wages and dwindling job security. [Bernie Sanders wants to tax financial trades to offer free college tuition.]

Why haven’t Democrats done more? [Bernie is an Independent Senator from the State of Vermont who calls himself a "democratic socialist" and who co-founded the Congressional Progressive Caucus and who is running in the Democratic primary.] True, they faced increasingly hostile Republican congresses. But they controlled both houses of Congress in the first two years of both Clinton’s and Obama’s administrations.

In part, it was because Democrats bought the snake oil of the “suburban swing voter” — the so-called “"soccer moms" in the 1990s and affluent politically-independent professionals in the 2000s — who supposedly determined
electoral outcomes. Meanwhile, as early as the 1980s they began drinking from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans — big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy.

Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class — putting together a coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos. But to do this they’d have to stop obsessing over upper-income suburban swing voters, and end their financial dependence on big corporations, Wall Street, and the wealthy. If not, a third party might emerge that does it instead. [Bernie Sanders represents that "third party" — millions of Americans who, like Bernie, are sick and tired of the pro-corporate Democrats who now support Hillary Clinton.]

New York Times: U.S. Growth and Employment Data Tell Different Stories (January 17, 2016):

President Obama’s rosy take on the economy in his State of the Union address relied largely on the fact that hiring over the last two years was the healthiest it has been since the late-1990s boom. But the bleak mirror image presented in the Republican debate last week is also based on some hard-to-dismiss economic data: The proportion of Americans in the labor force is the lowest since the 1970s, and wage gains for most workers in the recovery have been scant. The explanation for this dissonance may lie at least in part in the changing nature of the American economy...

The article goes on to explain how the U.S. economy went from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. That's because our best manufacturing and union jobs were offshored by Clinton (and Obama wants more of the same with his trade deals).
Whereas the new service economy is full of a lot of part-time low paying jobs, with college grads taking jobs that high school grads used to take, displacing high school grads and dropouts.

If we can elect Bernie Sanders as President and get a Congress with a majority of "progressive" Democrats (not "moderate" Democrats like Hillary and her supporters), we can change all this. But to do that, the country will need the support of African-American voters, who so far, back Hillary. Even though, most African-Americans prefer Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. The problem is, most of them just don't realize it ... yet.

This morning New Hampshire Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a big supporter of Hillary Clinton, was interviewed on MSNBC and asked if it was a mistake for Clinton to be taking those speaking fees from the big banks. Shaheen's response was, "That was all in the past, just like Bernie's socialism was in the past."

Should Hillary Clinton be indicted by Donald Trump's new AG?

Blogster-at-Large

Bud Meyers writes about the economy, politics, Social Security, corporate outsourcing, labor statistics, the REAL unemployment rate, taxes and tax evasion, government and corporate corruption, and the plight of the long-term unemployed.